Howdy glowforge fam, it’s been a minute since Ive updated. Recently I was asked to make a leather bundle for the Glowforge December Employee giveaway. After mulling it over I decided to make 3 things, A hand crafted leather notebook, a leather cuff and a custom acrylic pen.
The cuff is the third one I’ve made, but the first one I’ve been able to fully cut on the glowforge after working out some of the kinks in the first two. I used some cool tribal knotwork and tooled the leather around it, created some lore, as it’s inspired by homebrew D&D world, and put it all together.
The pen I made was originally going to be engraved with a logo and have some kind of Inlay, but by the time I got it shaped it was too shiny and pretty to engrave with anything. Not going lie, had to steal it back from my wife a few times she liked it so much.
Not pictured is the leather sleeve I made for the pen to sit in.
My favorite piece of this whole bundle however, has been this notebook. From the start I knew I had to do something special, pull out all the stops, so I grabbed my tooling leather and got to work. Cut the leather to size and picked an image, my library has a lot of different things in it, so this took some real testing and trial and error, but eventually I settled with the avatar for The Deep, a Kraken once turned minor diety in the lore of my D&D world.
This was the first time using acrylic paint pens on one of my leather projects, but ended up coming out with something extremely beautiful and I would consider getting it a tattoo all things being said.
I dyed the main skin of the notebook black to add in a bit of mystery and intrigue, matched the teal with a light teal thread and put on a decorative border, and now it was time for the big bang: Hand stained paper for a fantasy inspired notebook. I have some coffee pods that have been gathering dust since we stopped drinking coffee, so they came in handy as I proceeded to stain a lovely stack of legal paper, drying came in different methods, shout out to harbour freight for their heat gun, as it pulled its weight and then some in this process!
Binding the book and trimming the pages didn’t take long at all, and adding flair to the edges afterwards wrapped the notebook up nicely, my wife made me promise to make her her own version of this notebook since it looked so good.
I can’t wait for Glowforge to get their package next week, and I’m happy I was given this opportunity
Till next time
-Hock
